Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 11 - Sacred Clowns
Page 4
"That other house," he said. "The new one. Does that belong to you?"
The question surprised Chee, and Mrs. Kanitewa too.
"Yeah. The government built it. We use it to store stuff. They put a big refrigerator over there." She laughed. "They wanted us to live in it."
Blizzard opened his mouth, and closed it, leaving the question unasked. Chee answered it for him. After all, this Cheyenne was new to adobe country.
"This one's warm in the winter, and cool in the summer," he said.
"This one's home," Mrs. Kanitewa added.
Chee waited a moment in deference to Blizzard. But Blizzard seemed to have assumed the role of spectator. After all, he had already gone through questioning Mrs. Kanitewa once before.
"When Sergeant Blizzard was here," Chee began, "before the ceremonial, Delmar had just got home then. Is that right?"
Mrs. Kanitewa hesitated. "That's right," she said, looking embarrassed. "I didn't say that when he first asked me because I thought it was just about his running away from school. I wanted to talk to Delmar before they took him back to his dad." Clearly Mrs. Kanitewa lied reluctantly, even for her son.
"That day at the ceremonial, I saw Delmar at the kachina dance," Chee continued. "Sergeant Blizzard told me he understood that Delmar had come back to the pueblo but he hadn't had time to come by the house."
Mrs. Kanitewa looked uneasy. She glanced at Blizzard. "It wasn't quite like I told him," she said. She sighed, the weight of motherhood heavy. "He got home the day before the ceremonial. And he told me he was going back to school right after the ceremonial. Robert Sakani was going to drive him back. That's his cousin."
Sergeant Blizzard was trying not to look impatient. He failed.
"But after what happened to Mr. Sayesva, you didn't see him any more after that?" Chee asked. "He didn't come home to get his extra clothes or anything like that?"
Mrs. Kanitewa had raised her defenses. Her expression was blank. "No," she said, "he didn't."
Chee was looking past the woman into the kitchen, letting some time pass. He heard Blizzard shifting uneasily on the sofa. Blizzard, he thought, must be a city Cheyenne. With a clock for a brain. What the hell was the hurry?
"I ran away from boarding school myself once," Chee said. "The man was waiting for me to take me back when I got home. But it worried my mother."
"It does," Mrs. Kanitewa said. "It worries you."
"I guess you thought maybe he'd gone on back to school with his cousin. But that would worry you, too. Because why wouldn't he come home and say good-bye? It doesn't make much sense to me."
"That's what I was thinking," she said. "Where was he? He wouldn't just go like that. He would stay for the funeral."
"You would want to bury Mr. Sayesva right away," Chee said. "Isn't that the rule of the Pueblo? You want to do the burial before sundown."
"That's the way it is supposed to be. But they wouldn't let us do it. There was a deputy sheriff here when it happened, and Mr. Blizzard was here. And the police said they had to take him into Albuquerque to get an autopsy done to find out what killed him." Mrs. Kanitewa's expression suggested she considered this hard to understand. "He'd been hit on the head and his head broke, but they said they had to let the doctor see him anyway, to get it all down on paper, and they would try to get him back in time."
"They didn't, though," Chee said, making it a statement rather that a question. It would have been clearly impossible. Chee had seen a funeral at Zuni Pueblo. The body would have to be washed and dressed, the hair combed out, everything made ready for Sayesva's four-day journey through the darkness toward his eternal joy. A Tano child of God going home. And he was probably a Roman Catholic as well. The parish priest would also send him on his way with another blessing.
"It takes too long to get the body back," she said. "Then his wife and some of his people had to go there and get him. To make sure they didn't embalm him. They do that if you're not careful. The undertaker gets a lot of money for it."
"We Navajos have that trouble, too," Chee said. "If you're not there to stop it, the funeral home people will get the body and mutilate it and charge you a lot of money for doing it. Like they do with white people."
"They charge you a lot of money," Mrs. Kanitewa agreed. "I read in the papers that the funeral home people even got a law passed so you can't have the corpse incinerated. Even if you say so yourself, you got to get all the kin-folks to sign papers." She rubbed her fingers together-society's universal metaphor for the greed of its predator class. "They want to squeeze that money out of the widow."
Blizzard shifted his weight on the plastic sofa, creating a round of crackling and signaling his impatience with this philosophizing. "Well," he said. "You got about all you want?"
Chee ignored him.
"I'm not supposed to be asking anything about Mr. Sayesva because they handle that out of Albuquerque," he told Mrs. Kanitewa. "I'm just interested in talking with Delmar. Do you know why he came home?"
"Yes," she said. "He said he had to talk to his uncle."
Ahh, Chee thought. He glanced at Blizzard to see if he'd noticed this, if he was aware that Sayesva was the kid's uncle. Blizzard was. Too late now.
"To your brother?" Chee asked.
She nodded. "Yes. To my brother."
"He came to tell your brother something?"
She nodded.
Blizzard ceased being the stoic Cheyenne sitting motionless on the couch waiting for Chee to finish wasting his time. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.
"We're talking about Mr. Sayesva now," he said. "What did your boy tell him? What did he want to see him about?"
"It was religious business," she said. "He didn't tell me."
Sergeant Blizzard looked skeptical. "So how did you know it was religious if he didn't tell you?"
The question surprised Mrs. Kanitewa. "Because he didn't tell me," she explained. "If it wasn't religious, he would have told me."
Blizzard's expression changed from skeptical to blank. He said, "I don't quite." and then stopped. Chee considered interrupting to explain things. To give Blizzard a little lecture on how the Tano people, and most of the other Pueblos, kept their religious duties very much to themselves. Neither the boy nor any other citizen of the pueblo would ever discuss the business of his particular religious society with anyone not initiated into its kiva. Not even with his mother. Nor would she ask him to. If Delmar's discussion with his uncle was religious, only his uncle would know about it. Chee respected that. To hell with Blizzard. Let the sergeant handle this himself.
It took a little longer that way, but Blizzard eventually got it straightened out. Delmar had arrived at the pueblo the afternoon before the ceremony. He had dropped off his backpack and gone to the house of Sayesva. Then he had come home, eaten supper, talked to his mother about school. He had told her he would go back after the ceremony. Then, before he went to bed, he'd gone to see his uncle again.
"Saw him again?" Blizzard asked. "Why?"
Mrs. Kanitewa considered. "I don't know. He didn't say. But I think now that it might have been something he heard on the radio."
Blizzard's expression suggested this conversation was full of surprises. "Like what? What did he say?"
"Well, he said he had to see Mr. Sayesva again. And he ran out of the house."
Blizzard was leaning forward now. "I mean, what did he say he'd heard on the radio? Was it a news program or what?"
"He just said he had to go see his uncle. I didn't hear what he was listening to."
"What did he tell you when he came back?"
"I was asleep when he came back. It was late. Here we get up early, so we go to bed early."
Blizzard leaned back, looking thoughtful. Digesting all this. Chee formed a question. What station was the radio tuned to? What time was it when Delmar heard whatever he'd heard? He stirred, took a deep breath.
"Could you estimate what time it was when you were out in the kitchen? When Delmar."
Blizzard held up his hand. "Officer Chee," he said. "Hey, now."
"Suppertime," Mrs. Kanitewa said. "Just getting dark."
Blizzard was glaring at him. Chee swallowed the next question. The radio was on the end table beside the sofa. He looked at the dial. It was tuned to KNDN. "Kay-Indun." The fifty-thousand-watt Farmington voice of the Big Rez. KNDN-AM was all-Navajo, but the FM ver-sion was mostly English. The Kanitewa radio was tuned to FM.
"Sayesva had a telephone," Blizzard said. "At his office in Albuquerque and in his brother's house here. The boy could have called him from school."
"He was bringing him something," Mrs. Kanitewa said.
Another surprise. "What?"
She shrugged. "He didn't tell me. Something for Mr. Sayesva. Not my business."
"Something he wouldn't tell his mother about?" Blizzard asked.
"Not my business."
"Didn't you ask? Weren't you curious?"
"Not my business."
"Did you see it?"
"I saw a package."
"What did it look like?"
"Like a package," said Mrs. Kanitewa, whose expression suggested to Chee that what little patience she once had for police had worn thin. But she shrugged, and described it. "Sort of long." She held her hands about three feet apart. "Not big around. I thought maybe it was a poster or a picture or something like that. It was round, like one of those cardboard tubes people get to mail big pictures in."
"You didn't ask him what was in it?" Blizzard's tone made it clear that he was sure she had asked him.
"No," she said. Her expression made it clear to Chee that she was surprised Blizzard would even think such a thing.
"Where's the package?"
"He took it with him. I didn't see it no more."
"Took it when he went to see Sayesva?"
She nodded.
"And he didn't bring it back?"
Another nod.
And that was about it. There were a few details that Chee gingerly collected to keep Lieutenant Leaphorn happy. For example, the object was wrapped in a newspaper, but Mrs. Kanitewa didn't notice which one. For example, she had no idea where her son might be staying because he'd never done this before. For example, she asked them to promise to let her know as soon as they found the boy. She didn't have a telephone but they could call the Senas just three houses down.
Blizzard drove directly back to the access road and headed the patrol car back toward the highway.
"You think we ought to go to Sayesva's place?" Chee suggested. "See if we can find whatever it was the kid brought for him?"
Blizzard steered around the worst of the bumps. "Tell me how that helps you find the kid," he said, staring straight ahead. "It won't, so I'll take care of finding the package."
Chee considered that answer. "But not now?"
"Later," Blizzard said.
"When I'm not around?"
"Like you explained to me. Sayesva's not Navajo Police business. It wouldn't be nice to get you in trouble with your lieutenant."
Chee let it ride. Leaphorn would ask him what was in the package and he would tell the lieutenant why he didn't know, and about Blizzard. Maybe that would spare him working with Blizzard in the future.
"Wonder why the lady wouldn't tell us what the kid brought home?" Blizzard asked. The tone, for Blizzard, was friendly. "Did that strike you as funny?"
"No," Chee said. "She didn't tell us because she didn't know."
Blizzard gave him a sideways glance. "Man, what are you talking about? You don't know women, if you say that. Or you don't know mamas."
Chee said, "Well." and then dropped it. Why try to instruct this knucklehead in the Pueblo culture? The patrol car rattled off the gravel road, onto the asphalt toward Albuquerque. Chee let his imagination wander. He saw himself scouting for the Seventh Cavalry, shooting Cheyennes. The satisfaction in that fantasy lasted a few miles. He rehearsed his report to Leaphorn. He thought about Janet Pete. He thought about how the tip of her short-cut hair curled against her neck. He thought about the funny way she had of letting a smile start, letting him get a glimpse of it, and then suppressing it-pretending she hadn't appreciated his humor. He thought about her legs and hips in those tight jeans on the ladder above him at the Tano ceremonial. He thought about her kissing him, enthusiastically, and then catching his hand when.
"Why do you say she didn't know?" Blizzard asked, frowning at the windshield. "You know these people better than I do. I'm a city boy. My daddy worked for the post office in Chicago. I don't know a damn thing about this kind of Indians."
"There's a lot I don't know, too," Chee said. "Haven't been around Tanos much."
"Come on." Blizzard was grinning at him. "I been here just two months. I need help."
So do I, Chee thought, and you've been a pain in the butt. But, brother cop, brother Indian.
"Well," Chee said. "In most pueblos Delmar would be old enough to be initiated. He'd belong to one of the religious fraternities and he'd have religious duties. The way I understand it, you keep the secrets of your fraternity-your kiva- because only the people who have to know these secrets to perform their duties are supposed to know them. If uninitiated people know them, it dilutes the power. Waters it down. So I guess Delmar was probably a member of Sayesva's kiva. And whatever he brought his uncle was in some way religious. His mother wouldn't ask about it because you just don't ask about such things. And he wouldn't tell her if she did ask. And if he had told her, she damn sure wouldn't tell us."
"Interesting," Blizzard said. "Is it that way with you Navajos?"
"No," Chee said. "Our religion is family business. Traditionally, the more who show up at a curing ceremonial and take part the better. Except for some of the clans that live next to Pueblo tribes. Some of them picked up the Pueblo idea."
But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't totally true. The hataalii kept their secrets. He had been a student of Frank Sam Nakai since his middle teens, but he knew that Nakai-his uncle, his Little Father-still withheld something from him. That, too, was traditional. The hataalii didn't reveal the final secret of the ceremonial he was teaching until. until when? Chee had never been quite sure of that. Probably until the hataalii knew the student was worthy.
"Interesting," Blizzard said, and starting telling Chee something about the Cheyenne religion. It was something to do with how, a long, long time ago, a delegation of Comanches had come north and brought a string of horses with them as gifts to the Cheyennes. But the Comanches had told the Cheyennes that if they accepted the horses, they would have to change their religion because the horses would totally change their lives. Blizzard was saying something about following the migrating buffaloes. But Chee had stopped listening. It occurred to him just then that he was going to marry Janet Pete. Or try to marry her. And he was thinking about that.
4
LEAPHORN AND David W. Streib took the short way from Window Rock to Crownpoint and a conference with Lieutenant Ed Toddy, in whose reservation precinct Eric Dorsey had died. They followed old Navajo Route 9 past the Nazhoni Trading Post, Coyote Wash, and Standing Rock, and crossed that invisible line that separated the Big Rez from the Checkerboard. Special Agent Streib worked out of the Farmington office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Since the wrongful death of Eric Dorsey was clearly a felony committed on a federal reservation and therefore a federal offense, he was responsible for the investigation. But that didn't make it particularly interesting to him. Streib could be described as a Bureau old-timer. He should have been in an assignment much loftier than a tiny office in northwestern New Mexico from which he dealt mostly with Indian reservation business. But the whimsical sense of humor that had earned Streib his nickname of Dilly had not earned him the confidence of those selected by J. Edgar Hoover to run his FBI. And while Hoover was now long gone, Hoover's reign had lasted longer than Streib's ambitions. Special Agent Streib had evolved into a laid-back, contented man with lots of friends in Indian Country.